If you find this information applicable to additional versions/releases, please edit this page and modify this header to reflect that. Please also include any necessary modifications for this information to apply to the additional versions.

This page describes the steps needed to setup a windows DHCP server in order to run the LTSP Ubuntu

The Ubuntu default install of LTSP assumes that you are going to use the built in DHCP server to assign ip addresses to your clients. In many establishments this is not the desired method for implementation as there is most likely an existing DHCP server. The following steps detail how to make specific machines boot from the LTSP server, but utilise a windows DHCP server for the ip assignment.

This guide assumes you already have a running windows DHCP server and that you are specifying certain machines to boot from the LTSP server, ie. the majority of your machines are still running as they normally would.

IMPORTANT To prevent possible conflicts between your DHCP server and the LTSP DHCP server (if you installed 'ltsp-server-standalone', which includes a dhcp server), run the following command on the LTSP server to remove the DHCP package

You might want to specify a configuration for PXE booting clients by obtaining the MAC address of each machine that requires to be bootable on the LTSP server and configuring your MS DHCP server accordingly (if you have other computers on your network that try to network boot before other methods, people might get a surprise when they next reboot!) This can be achieved by asking the specified machine to try to boot from LAN. A DHCP message will appear, similar to the following

Note that some users have to append server name to root path to get NFS to function ie server:/opt/ltsp/i386

If you are the impatient type, you can restart the DHCP server, via services.msc to ensure that the reservation is available. Then, once you reset the client machine it should be able to connect to the LTSP server and use the LTSP's root filesystem, as opposed to trying to use the DHCP server's.